" Shall I Be Your Chat Companion?" Towards an Online Human-Computer Conversation System

Xiangyang Zhou

Abstract: To establish an automatic conversation system between human and computer is regarded as one of the most hardcore problems in computer science. It requires interdisciplinary techniques in information retrieval, natural language processing, and data management, etc. The challenges lie in how to respond like a human, and to maintain a relevant, meaningful, and continuous conversation. The arrival of big data era reveals the feasibility to create such a system empowered by data-driven approaches. We can now organize the conversational data as a chat companion. In this paper, we introduce a chat companion system, which is a practical conversation system between human and computer as a real application. Given the human utterances as queries, our proposed system will respond with corresponding replies retrieved and highly ranked from a massive conversational data repository. Note that'practical'here …